ABSTRACT
Most traditional economics departments have one educational objective in mind: to produce believers in, and academic practitioners of, traditional economics. This “Darwinian” desire to reproduce blinds traditional academics to the reality that the vast majority of their students will never be academic economists. It also explains the relentless emphasis upon forever expanding teaching of technical quantitative subjects (and core subjects like microeconomics) that has contributed to the political economy backlash against mathematics in general. If, as many of us have, you spend your time fighting against the encroachment of quantitative subjects on teaching slots once allocated to courses in economic history and the history of economic thought, you become reflexively opposed to mathematics whenever more of it is suggested. However, I hope that political economists can be less obsessed with self-reproduction and, perhaps ironically, more responsive to the job market for which most of our students need to be prepared. The vast majority of economics graduates are not going to become academic economists – or even private-sector or government economists – but will use some economic thinking while working in much more broadly defined roles in business, government, and the community sector. For these students, and also the minority who go on to actually practice as economists, the fundamentals of a political economy education should be courses in economic history, the history of economic thought, and political economy – the study of the key literature in political economic thought. These subjects could be reintroduced to the many courses in linear quantitative methods. For the minority departments where they are no longer compulsory by eliminating the current who actually want to practice as economists (academic or otherwise), I argue that mathematics and computing courses are necessary. But this sets me against a significant perspective in political economy today, which is to eschew mathematics on the grounds that the use of mathematical methods is the major reason why traditional economics has failed. Tony Lawson, the founder of the influential “Critical Realism” movement within political economy, provides the most eloquent expression of this anti-mathematical view.1
